A hole cutter, or hole saw, is a type of cutter used in drilling circular holes in various materials, such as wood, metal, drywall, etc. A hole cutter typically has a substantially cylindrical body that defines a side wall, a circular cutting edge with teeth located at one end of the body and designed to cut a work piece during rotation of the cutter, and a cap located at the end of the body opposite the cutting edge. The cap typically includes threads, holes or other structure adapted to allow the hole cutter to be drivingly connected to a drill, such as through an arbor. In use, the circular cutting edge creates a circular hole in a work piece and, in turn, removes a circular work piece slug therefrom. Typically, after the hole is cut in the work piece, the work piece slug is retained within the hollow interior of the hole cutter and must be removed therefrom prior to cutting another hole.
Prior art hole cutters include apertures or slots formed in the side walls of the hole cutters that allow users to insert a lever, such as a screwdriver, through the side wall and into the interior of the hole cutter to, in turn, lever or otherwise urge the slug out of the hole cutter. This manual slug removal task can be time-consuming and take substantial effort on the part of the user. A slug may be difficult to extract from within the body of a cutter, even with a hole cutter that includes slug removal apertures or slots, because the slug can become tightly wedged in the cutter or because the slug removal apertures or slots are not aligned with the slug. For example, a slug may become warped or cracked and thus firmly lodged within the hole cutter. As another example, some work pieces, such as woods, contain sticky or glue-like residue that inhibits slug removal. As yet another example, thicker and thinner work pieces will create slugs of differing thicknesses and slugs positioned at different locations within the hole cutter. A thick work piece can create a thick slug that is pushed deep into the body of the hole cutter, whereas a thin work piece can create a thin slug located near the cutting edge. Accordingly, slugs often do not simply “pop” out of the cutter when worked by a tool. Slugs often slide short distances, twist, tilt or otherwise gradually or incrementally move along the inside of the cutter. The apertures in the side walls of prior art hole cutters can be relatively short, and therefore may be used only to remove either relatively thin or relatively thick work piece slugs, but not both types of slugs, and possibly not slugs of medium thicknesses. Other prior art hole cutters have plural apertures that are axially and angularly spaced relative to each other, wherein each aperture is relatively short in length. These types of apertures may require moving the screwdriver or other lever from one aperture to another in order to lever a slug out of the hole cutter. Further, no one aperture may be properly positioned for a particular slug thickness, or a particular slug positioning within the interior of the hole cutter, further contributing to the difficult and time consuming nature of the slug removal process.
Accordingly, it is an object of the present invention to overcome one or more of the above-described drawbacks and/or disadvantages of the prior art.